Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody Page B

and Schoenberg. Mercurial, puckish, combative, and increasingly politicized, Godard was hailed during his 1968 speaking tour of American universities as being “as irreplaceable for us as Bob Dylan.” 2
    Yet when Godard came to the United States that year for a celebrity tour of American universities, he was actually in a state of crisis and doubt. Even as his fame and his inventiveness increased through the 1960s, he became confused and uncertain in his work, which was being pulled in opposite directions by itsfictional and nonfictional elements, by its personal and political implications. As the pace of social change outstripped his ability to invent new forms to engage it, Godard became increasingly strident in his response to the world around him. In his frustration, he also became increasingly hard on himself. Indeed, his films became public confessions and self-flagellations, but they were executed so effervescently, so inventively, so cleverly—with such a flamboyant and youthful sense of freedom—that they were most often received by critics and viewers as virtuosic displays of experimental gamesmanship.
    The last of this torrent of films, Weekend , concludes with two title cards: the first reads “End of Film” the second, “End of Cinema.” When Godard finished filming Weekend , his fifteenth feature film in eight years, he advised the regular members of his crew that they should look for work elsewhere. He spent the next few years seemingly underground, working in a frenzied yet sterile engagement with one of the doctrines of May 1968, a nominal Maoism. After years of intellectual woodshedding and a period of artistic and physical convalescence (following a serious motorcycle accident), he returned to the French film industry in 1979. The films and videos he has made since that return are works of an even greater originality and a more reflective artistry than those of the 1960s, but Godard has never recovered his place at the center of his times.
    I N A CERTAIN SENSE , Godard has been a victim of his own artistic success. Ashe fulfilled, after long delay, the underlying promise of the French New Wave—to turn movies into an art form as sophisticated and as intellectually powerful as literature or painting—his work became far too allusive and intricate for the wide range of moviegoers. In the earlier films, splashy borrowings from American movies and the presence of pop culture icons and iconography of the day went a long way to keep Godard in fashion even when his approach to them reflected the challenging philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre or Claude Lévi-Strauss. Yet in his later work, Godard became even more intensely serious and demanding. His previous films represented a dismantling of movie conventions and forms; in his subsequent work he took on the colossal task of an aesthetic reconstruction of the cinema based on its excavated historical elements. Holding the present day up to comparison with the high points of cultural history, Godard found it wanting; his critique—indeed, utter rejection—of the contemporary culture of mass media made many people, especially the younger generations raised on that culture, simply wish that he would lighten up.
    Lightening up is a notion profoundly at odds for a filmmaker who has made the greatest possible claims on behalf of the cinema’s unique relation to reality and to history, of its power to transform whatever comes within its purview. As Godard told me, “Everything is cinema.” Indeed, for Godard,the cinema is the art of arts, encompassing and channeling the full spectrum of what is human, from the broadest political currents and the other art forms to the most intimate reaches of his own life. For Godard, the cinema has always been inseparable from his personal experience—and his own identity has been inseparable from the cinema. His initial enthusiasm for movies had the force of a religious conversion, and his critical account of the medium’s